Former US President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are being reinstated, parent company Meta announced Wednesday, according to NBC News.
Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, said Trump’s accounts will be reinstated “in the coming weeks” and come with “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.”
Those guardrails will include "heightened penalties for repeat offenses — penalties which will apply to other public figures whose accounts are reinstated from suspensions related to civil unrest under our updated protocol. In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation," Clegg said in a post on the company's website.
Facebook banned Trump from the platform in the wake of the January 6, 2021, riots on the US Capitol, claiming Trump had encouraged the riots.
In May of 2021, the Facebook Oversight Board — an independent group which reviews Facebook’s thorniest content rulings — affirmed the decision to suspend Trump.
Wednesday’s announcement comes a week after Trump's campaign formally petitioned Meta to unblock his account.
“We believe that the ban on President Trump’s account on Facebook has dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse,” Trump’s campaign wrote in its January 17 letter to Meta, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by NBC News.
Trump was also banned from Twitter and a host of other sites following the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots.
However, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated Trump’s account in November.